MURKY THOUGHTS, FULLY FORMED ART / Tucker Nichols: An artist well known for his wall drawings that incorporate text with images in unsettling ways, he approaches his work with the zeal of an investigative reporter.

MURKY THOUGHTS, FULLY FORMED ART / Tucker Nichols: An artist well known for his wall drawings that incorporate text with images in unsettling ways, he approaches his work with the zeal of an investigative reporter.

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For a piece in New York about taxicab culture, Nichols interviewed drivers and passengers, spending a lot of time "observing and thinking" about that storied community. In Los Angeles, he worked on a commissioned project at a Greyhound bus terminal, finding a location that was an entry point for immigrants. In a forthcoming piece for Bravo TV headquarters in New York, Nichols went there, sat in on meetings and talked to employees in preparation for doing a wall drawing that will reflect his thinking on television, and on reality television in particular.

What sets Nichols apart from say, a journalist, is his desire to compose half-complete thoughts, rather than dispensing fully digested information.

"I could write an essay," he says of his latest endeavor, a wall drawing at Lincart gallery that will reflect the Bay Area's problematic preoccupation with real estate (an ironic obsession, Nichols points out, seeing as we've just celebrated our earthquake centennial). "But I'm not that interested in making an argument. I'm more interested in figuring out how seemingly contradictory ideas sit in my brain and I digest them.

"To take all those ideas and leave them in mid-processed state -- that's how we really think about things. We write term papers and we read newspapers, we spend most of our days with less complete thoughts, but we're still not totally sure."

In addition to being inspired by the general conversation around housing in San Francisco, Nichols uses the location of Lincart -- next to a construction site for a condominium, which -- no joke -- is named "The Hayes." ("Closer to 'The Haze,' " Nichols laughs.) While none of the other pieces he'll be showing are explicitly about housing, they share the same notion of incomplete thoughts, provocative and compelling because they refuse to tell the audience what to think.

Nichols, a Mill Valley resident with a master's degree from Yale in Chinese painting, has been one of the Bay Area's most widely shown artists, with illustrations published in the New York Times and McSweeney's, and international gallery shows. Curiosity has been a motivating force throughout his career.

"I got into Chinese painting by seeing work by one artist, simple ink paintings made 500 years ago, and I was amazed that something drawn so quickly, so simply, 500 years ago and a continent away could still be so alive to me," Nichols says. "I tried that in grad school for a long time, with academic writing, to understand this. This," he says, referring to making art himself, "is a much more satisfying way to get to the bottom of that."